Houston Conwill, Estella Conwill Majozo, and Joseph DePace's terrazzo floor plan, entitled Rivers, fills the lobby entrance of the Schomberg Center's auditorium. The cosmological diagram pays homage to both the poet Langston Hughes and the bibliophile Arthur Schomburg, after whom the building is named. The design features a mandala with inset verses from Hughes's poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, and terrazzo rivers flow outward. The poet's ashes lie beneath the center of the design, which is etched with the concluding line of the poem, "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

The Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture is a national research library devoted to collecting, preserving and providing access to resources documenting the history and experiences of peoples of African descent throughout the world. The renovation of the Schomburg Center includes the creation of a new Center for Scholars, as well as the renovation of several key public spaces. A new glass façade, complete with a video wall viewable at night from Malcolm X Boulevard, and a prominent new entry, announce the library to the neighborhood. A new street-level gallery was created by inserting a partial floor in the former double-height reading room. The reading room can be seen from the gallery and has been reconfigured to reveal a soaring ceiling topped with acoustic wood panels. The room is the dramatic setting for Aaron Douglas's four signature 1934 murals titled "Aspects of Negro Life." The new Center for Scholars has a Scholar's Forum area for readings and lectures, private offices and a conference room. The project includes the renovation of the reading and reference areas, electronic research area, Photo Print Vault Room, stacks and entrance lobby. The building's systems and electronically controlled systems were completely upgraded.

This influential mural, created by Aaron Douglas, a leading member of the Harlem Renaissance, depicts the African American journey from freedom in Africa, to slavery in the United States, and finally freedom again in the modern age of the 1930s. The painting style depicts shadows of individuals in an abstracted, almost cubist form. In this image, Douglas juxtaposes the "happy southern plantation Negro" myth, shown by singing and dancing a brutal lynching and black slaves laboring in the fields. Racism and poverty are shown through Douglas's mural, yet an inclusion of a star and its ray of light in the left-hand corner of the mural shows an optimistic future.